Orientalism by Edward Saïd

Edward Saïd was an important thinker of the end of the XX century. He was born on November 1st of 1935, in Jerusalem and died on September 25th of 2003, in New York. He had a twice cultural aspect. Firstly, he is born in Jerusalem and lived in Cairo, Egypt, so he had the Oriental culture. Secondly, he lived in the United States since he was 15 years for his study and spent a large part of his life in this country and became American, so he also had an Occidental culture. Saïd work a lot on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but his most important work was Orientalism which was published in 1978. This work is considered as one of the founding texts of postcolonial studies. It is this work that we are going to talk about with the introduction to Edward Said’s Orientalism. For Edward Said, Orientalism is “a way of coming to terms with Orient that is based on the Orient’s special place in European Western experience” (p. 1). The Orient was almost a European invention and Western countries used of their Orient’s representation to define their own. These countries used Orient as an image of the other and that’s permits to create a contrast. With the contrast between Occident and Orient came the fact of imbalance between these two, Orientalism induces some dominance of Occident on Orient which permits Occident to gain in strength and identity. This distinction was mainly accepted by a lot of different writers, such as poets, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists. Moreover, this distinction was used by these writers at a “starting point for elaborate theories, epic novels, social descriptions or political account concerning the Orient”. This was the case of the French poet Victor Hugo or the Prussian theorist Karl Marx for example. We have to precise that the Orient and Orientalism at first, during the beginning of nineteenth century and until the World War II, was dominated by France and Britain. And, after the World War II, America reproduced the same relation with Orient, like France and Britain. Now that we had an idea of what Orientalism is, it would be interesting to approach some qualifications of the concept. Firstly, the Orientalism didn’t correspond to Orient, it is a concept with a lot of stereotypes despite any correspondence with the “real” Orient. Secondly, Orientalism refers to a means to divide the space in two parts with a part which is dominates the other part. More specifically, Orient with Orientalism is “dominated” by Occident and their relations are clearly about power and domination. Thirdly, Orientalism is nothing than a structural mixed of lies and myths. For Edward Said, “Orientalism is more particularly valuable as a sign of European-Atlantic power over the Orient than it is as a veridic discourse about Orient. ” To conclude, we have seen during this summary and through the Orientalism concept the will of “domination” of Occident on Orient, we can question ourselves if this will is still relevant.